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Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has had a varied career in publishing and related fields. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (mostly for the Science Fiction Book Club), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and related products to accountants for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters on large online legal products. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

I got these links from Lou Anders (I'll admit it; I don't try to read every single SF/F/H writer's blog anymore), and I agree with nearly everything Bacigalupi says. (Especially the bit about direct mail; the only thing that's comparable is telemarketing, which used to be a fantastic marketing channel before the financial services assholes poisoned the well for everyone.)

Part One: Why Are "the Big Three" Dying?(Although, as both Sheila Williams and Gordon Van Gelder pointed out to me this past weekend, the big three are not actually dying, and just because the outside world only has one metric about the health of a magazine, it does not thereby follow that it is a good metric.)

Part Three: Online Marketing(Not the same old suggestions at all; Bacigalupi has some great ideas...whether or not they're actually feasible is another story, and only the people running the magazines could determine that.)

3 comments:

I think he's right about the problem of the magazines not doing their own direct mail ads -- for a reason other than what he gave.

I've gotten an ad from F&SF which was cleverly designed for appeal to people who love visual sci-fi and who don't want any of that literary crap. The ad had to be designed by someone who had no idea what the magazine was like.

Michael: They weren't horribly specific, though Gordon did mention (in public) that this last year would have been F&SF's most profitable since he took it over, if not for the huge postal increase.

Sheila had an interesting comparison: her division (which does Asimov's, Analog, and the two mystery magazines) is similar to a mass-market publisher that puts out forty books a year -- all of which sell twenty thousand or more copies. Put that way, it sounds very successful.

And there's the issue of how much of the peak circulation of the magazines was made up of cheap "stamp" subscriptions, which only became profitable on renewals.

All in all, I guess the point is that circulation is just one number -- all by itself, it doesn't necessarily mean anything.